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One would think I should be all grown up by now, and mostly, I believe I am.  After all, I’m a grandmother, a “Bubbe”, as my youngest granddaughter calls me.  I don’t sit in a rocking chair, bake pies all the time, or tell tales of the “old country”. (Well maybe I do if the old country is Brooklyn, N.Y. or SF in the 60’s.)

I don’t put my teeth in a glass at night, thanks to the expensive miracles of modern dentistry, I suppose.  I rarely need to drink prune juice (though I think it’s delicious).  I am able to laugh when my adult year daughter tells me a story.  I ask if she is referring to a ménage à trois, and she tells me I am a “dirty old lady” for even thinking that, and need to have my mouth washed out with……Are you ready for this?….METAMUCIL (stool softener for those who haven’t done regular geriatric or invalid care).

I hit the gym at least several times most weeks.  On our very recent trip to California, I was able to walk miles to the car rental place when L.A.X. was shut down and they wouldn’t allow vehicles in or out due to the shootings there, so I prefer to think I don’t qualify as an old lady yet.

When I visit a college campus, it really seems like only a heartbeat ago that I was at that stage of life.  I look around and sometimes even momentarily believe I belong in a setting like this and that I “fit in”. “Why, I don’t feel or look much different than these young people” (till I  check out the mirror).

When I do look in the mirror I know I am not a kid, but still, it sometimes takes my breath away to realize how many decades and experiences are behind me.  Sometimes it even makes me sad.  Mostly it just amazes me.

Last week, in addition to having the pleasure of seeing a variety of cousins at a wonderful family wedding in L.A., we headed to Northern California. We had dinner near Santa Cruz with a college buddy who later remarked “You are still very much you, after nearly 50 years.” He, too, seemed much as I remembered him, but more comfortable in his own skin and more self-assured, having already demonstrated kindness and compassion in email communications.  Then we headed to San Francisco and one night, had dinner with an old friend from my Haight Ashbury days.  Jeffrey also seemed very much the person I remembered. He, like most who reach our age, has been through a lot of loss and disappointment, but he seems just as crazy, (in a good way) just as unique, just as much of a committed champion of human rights, and as anti-establishment as ever.

I have heard about people who change drastically as they age and particularly as they become successful. I am sure there are folks like this, but it hasn’t been my own experience among those I know.

I have found that most people grow deeper and more interesting with experience. We sail the same seas, I think, that we began to sail in our youths, but perhaps we negotiate the waves a bit differently. Maybe we only take on the smallest, most gentle swells of the water now (the ankle busters). We may not be up to the most exciting and daring challenges we were once attracted to, or able-bodied enough to conquer them. Perhaps our experiences have made us a little fearful.  Maybe we are truly  still the Kamikazes we once were, and we eagerly, almost defiantly take on the biggest, most glorious and most dangerous waves.

If we were once seekers, we probably still are.  If we were doers, I think we continue to need to produce, to do and to make a difference as long as we are able to.  We may be a bit less patient now, or a bit more patient and understanding than we once were. If we needed answers before, the answers may be even more urgent to us at this stage. The opposite might be true too. We may be content with leading our lives in a way that allows the answers to just come to us as we live (See Rilke poem at the end of this).

Today, I ask that you think about how you have changed since your own youth.  Have you mellowed and improved with time? Tell us how, please! Are you fully grown up now?  What questions still burn for you that need answers? What remains unsaid that you truly need to tell someone, or to tell the world? Is there a purpose that is the wind beneath your wings and makes you soar, no matter how old you are? Do you need to find a new focus, a new purpose that gets your heart racing in a good way, that puts new sparkle in your eyes, and that reconnects you to the world?  Will you share?

I think I am mostly grown up now, finally!  I have changed, and yet have stayed the same. I don’t know that I want to grow up all the way, though, till I have left this planet to become a distant memory in the wind, a familiar feeling in someone’s heart,  words on paper, or on a slab of marble. And you?

“Be patient toward all
that is unsolved in your
heart and try to love the
questions themselves,
like locked rooms and
like books that are now
written in a very foreign
tongue.  Do not now
seek answers, which
canot be given you
because you would not
be able to live them.
  And the point is, to live
everything.  Live the
questions now.  Perhaps
you will then gradually,
without noticing it, live
along some distant day
into the answer.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke